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The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

nytimes.com

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Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#141

Post by pilsetnieks »

ElBarto wrote: post #131
anonu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears wasteful. Being deadlocked, spending multiples of $100k on ceremonies. The group should be promoting the language and getting people excited about it's use. Instead, French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' instead of 'courriel' because an ineffectual body refused to admit an Englishism into the language. This holds the language back. Languages are fluid, living breathing things and that aspect sh…

They should feel very guilty of confusing "numerique" and "digital" all the time. In French, 'numerique' generally means 'digital' and 'digital' only means related to fingers (e.g. fingerprint is 'empreinte digitale').

In English "digital" also means related to fingers (because your hand has 5 digits.)

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#142

Post by Udik »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #119
Udik wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the reasons is elegance. As in coding, you try to minimise special cases, so whenever you need to introduce a new word you go back to the roots of the language and try to derive it from what's already there. In this way the chosen word is more integrated in the language (has more connections with other existing words), its pronunciation is more predictable, and its derivation follows the same rules as…

But according to the OP following Latin increases surprise. Hence my question. "yet, it's far more likely for the public to simply add an 'e' to the end of 'docteur" It isn't "elegant" if the public is "far more likely" to do it a different way.

Good point. I guess that, as always, what counts as a "surprise" depends on your overall knowledge of the system. (For example: an eclipse of the moon is a surprise if you don't know astronomy, the absence of an expected one would be a far bigger surprise for those who do). I've found the following declaration from the Academie:

"formes telles que professeure, recteure, sapeuse-pompière, auteure, ingénieure, procureure [..] sont contraires aux règles ordinaires de dérivation et constituent de véritables barbarismes"

So, it feels wrong to them, who know the derivation rules. Probably it feels slightly more obvious to those who don't.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#143

Post by [deleted] »

bane wrote: post #136
gerard2 wrote: post #20

As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. And in fact the usage of the french language is quite diverse, even in France. You can have regiona…

So here's my knee-jerk attitude: To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that t…

[deleted]

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#144

Post by coldtea »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #137
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary? No. > "Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest" Better that, than the mix of pop culture references and business weasel words, the English have…

> Better that, than the mix of pop culture references and business weasel words, the English have become. That makes little sense. Anyway, I'm going to go and synergise my Kim Kardashians.

Noice! You're putting the p... on the chain wax! How disruptively on-demand!

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#145

Post by benj111 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #140
benj111 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define accident. None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned.

Who needs to plan a language? I love the mess that is English, there's so much history encoded in it - like how our words for common farm animals are Anglo-Saxon but the words for their meat are French, which is a snapshot of England being invaded by a French speaking Norman aristocracy who ate what the Anglo-Saxon peasants raised. I love the different dialects that are developing of it. I particularly love my countr…

I agree with the sentiment. It's a mess, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, though there are draw backs.

"Of course, I'm glad I'm not having to learn it as a second language."

As I said, I agree with the sentiment :)

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#146

Post by gerard2 »

bane wrote: post #136
gerard2 wrote: post #20

As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. And in fact the usage of the french language is quite diverse, even in France. You can have regiona…

So here's my knee-jerk attitude: To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that t…

Thank you for your honest and well argumented response. Just to be clear, my intention defending the Academie was not to go full nationalism and pretend that thanks to this god-like institution our language is the best in the world and as bearer of this language we, the french people, really are superior to everyone else. This is far from true. However I felt like this article was an unjust attack to an institution considered as quite harmless here in France. To be fair, I think a lot of people agree that it is an institution from another time, and a very few people think that it's the most useful. However I think people still have a tender liking for it and what it represents. And that is part of the french identity. As paradoxical as it may seem, being a frenchman is dreaming of being the next Marat or Jean Jaures while being a sucker for the symbols of authority. What this article calls pomp we call it "panache", and most people like this folklore. However I don't personally think that this make the french language any better that the english language or any other language. We just like our language because, as many things in France, it is charged with our history.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#147

Post by School-Cotton »

dorfsmay wrote: post #135
vixen99 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English speakers themselves are quite capable of sorting this kind of thing out for themselves without waiting for the deliberations of the appointed whose decisions they'll probably ignore anyway - as do the French, one gathers. Life and English are both messy but we muddle through.

If you see biweekly somewhere, it is impossible to know what it means without more explanations, even context isn't enough. This has been like this for years and nobody's even tried to fix it. What is the point of having such confusion? Also, why having dictionaries at all? And who decides which one is right? Why not have a body made up of experts who make that decisions once and for all when natural evolution leads…

> Also, why having dictionaries at all?

Exactly the opposite of why you think we have them, apparently. In English-speaking countries, dictionaries document existing usage, they don’t try to influence it. No modern dictionary has any opinion on what usage is “correct”, and you can find a lot of extremely non-standard things in the most prestigious dictionaries.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#148

Post by mywittyname »

baud147258 wrote: post #123
anonu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears wasteful. Being deadlocked, spending multiples of $100k on ceremonies. The group should be promoting the language and getting people excited about it's use. Instead, French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' instead of 'courriel' because an ineffectual body refused to admit an Englishism into the language. This holds the language back. Languages are fluid, living breathing things and that aspect sh…

> French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' Dunno, when I'm using email, or any other English word part of our developper vocabulary, like build or bug, I don't feel guilty, I'm just using the words that are used by the rest of my (all-French) team.

And when I'm cooking, I use French terms to describe what I want. It just makes sense this way because the terms are just more specific than if they were translated, i.e., brunoise, mirepoix, chiffonade, etc.

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#149

Post by lapnitnelav »

bane wrote: post #136
gerard2 wrote: post #20

As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. And in fact the usage of the french language is quite diverse, even in France. You can have regiona…

So here's my knee-jerk attitude: To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that t…

That last anecdote gave us the verb baragouiner (which means speaking unintelligibly) that came from Bara and Gwinn which respectively means bread and wine.

The Bretons, unable to speak French, were only communicating in their own language and sometimes thought as being German. Terrible combo on the Eastern Front

Re: The Guardians of the French Language Are Deadlocked

#150

Post by harperlee »

gonzus wrote: post #95
robocat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French? Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer

To complicate things even further, although "ordenador" may be the official word in Spanish for "computer", it is merrily ignored in many countries, which simply will use the atrocious neologism "computador". I know, I do. :-)

But doesn’t this directly follow the latin computare?
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